Data in a storage system has a life cycle characteristic. For example, a network video produced recently is watched by many people and has a large access amount, so that in a video server, the video is hot spot data; as time goes on, after several months, the video is not focused by people, and the access amount of the video sharply decreases, so that in the video server, the video is data with general popularity; and after several years, the video is rarely watched by people and is also rarely accessed by people, so that in the video server, the video is cold spot data.
Different management may be performed on data at different stages of a life cycle. For example, tiered storage may be performed on data, hot spot data is migrated into a tier of high performance in the storage system, where an input speed is fast in the tier of high performance, so as to improve an input speed of the data; and cold spot data is migrated into a tier of poor performance, where an input speed is slow in the tier of poor performance, so as to meet a performance and capacity requirement of the storage system at a low price.
A chunk is a basic storage unit in the storage system, and data is stored in the chunk. A monitoring parameter of each chunk, such as an access frequency and an IO size, is monitored, then data obtained through monitoring is stored in a storage medium (such as a memory), and by analyzing monitoring data, monitoring of a life cycle of data in a chunk may be implemented. However, the number of monitoring records is decided by the total number of chunks, so that it is often difficult to meet an actual requirement of a user, for example, after a great mass of chunks are stored in the storage system, a large number of monitoring records bring a huge challenge to the capacity of the storage medium.